What’s going on with Mark Zuckerberg? He recently conspicuously pivoted toward MAGA, meeting quietly with incoming Trump officials, and complaining about the Biden administration on Joe Rogan’s podcast. This week, we trace the story of the Meta CEO, and investigate what his new persona means for the 4 billion people who use his products. Support the show: searchengine.show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Joinbuilt.com slash search to start earning points on your rent payments today. The second Trump term begins this week. We're all waiting to see what's going to happen. The future feels even less predictable than usual. I find myself looking for indications, small signs that might give me a clue as to where things could be headed. I hadn't thought much about Mark Zuckerberg in a while.
I try to avoid social media. I post our episodes on Threads and on Instagram, two of his platforms, but I don't know. Threads in particular, which was supposed to be a Twitter competitor, feels empty. I always joke that as a social network, it reminds me of trying to have a conversation while someone runs a loud vacuum cleaner nearby.
And I guess I do use WhatsApp to talk to the friends who've arbitrarily migrated there. So I use Metaproducts multiple times a day. But Zuckerberg, he's just, he's no Elon Musk. He doesn't squat in my mind, forcing me to have opinions about him. Even though Mark Zuckerberg's products reach way more people than Twitter and Tesla, over 4 billion people use a Metaproduct each month.
Zuckerberg is just quieter, strategically boring, or he used to be. In the past, CEOs' public images mostly stayed constant. It was their platforms that every once in a while rolled out a redesign. These days, though, it's the CEO's public persona that gets a new version every so often. And this year, we've got a new Mark Zuckerberg, one that is noticeably spicier,
This Zuckerberg likes to post videos of himself online having what I would call masculine adventures. He competes in Brazilian jujitsu. He trades bow hunting tips with Joe Rogan. And this Zuckerberg is more open about his frustrations with journalists, with life under the Biden administration, with calls from the left for limits on certain kinds of speech.
Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice.
It was this Zuckerberg who took to Instagram Reels last week to announce some profound changes to how he will run his section of the Internet in a way that better accords with his evolving values.
And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
He listed what this would actually mean for users of Facebook threads and Instagram.
First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S.,
So Meta, like X, would now rely on unpaid volunteers, on crowdsourcing, to decide what was true and what wasn't. The voice of the people, the voice of truth. Another change, the bounds of what users are allowed to post has now been expanded. Meta's moderators were handed new training materials, which included quotes of the types of things users could now say.
One example, quote, "...migrants are no better than vomit." Another, quote, trans people aren't real, they're mentally ill. Zuckerberg described this change more diplomatically.
We're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.
So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
There's something in the tone of this video that I haven't heard from a Mark Zuckerberg clip before. Anger would be putting it too strongly, but he's defiant. He's certainly unapologetic. And he looks noticeably different. He's bulked up a lot. And he has this big mop of hair and a prominent gold chain.
Wait, I have to pause you right here. You missed the most important part of his outfit. The enormous watch? That cost $900,000.
That watch is $900,000?
This man and his trillion-dollar company sat in front of a camera and told his user base they were going to need to step up and become volunteer moderators of his platform while he wore a $900,000 watch.
That voice belongs to Casey Newton, who covers social media companies at his excellent newsletter, Platformer. A $900,000 watch? Yeah. What does it do? Apparently, it tells the time.
This week, I found myself talking to not just Casey, but a few other folks, and going deep on Mark Zuckerberg's public interviews and backstory, trying to understand not just these recent changes to Meta's platforms, but the changes to the person himself. We reached out to Mehta with a request for an interview or a comment. We didn't hear back.
But I was trying to understand how Mark Zuckerberg had gone from being a left-of-center tech guy, friendly to Democrats, someone who donated half a billion dollars to criminal justice and progressive immigration reforms, to someone in the MAGA tent. Had he changed his mind? Was this who he'd been all along?
I spent this week tracing the story of Mark Zuckerberg's public life, all the different people he's been, to try to understand how we'd ended up with this new one.
And now there's a new form of cyber matchmaking, college networking websites. Is this perhaps the next big thing?
It's April 2004, and CNBC is doing a short segment profiling two precocious college kids who've each built social media websites at their universities. One of them is Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of thefacebook.com. Mark appears on screen.
Mark, if somebody was to put the question to you about the magnitude of what you think you've launched, how big do you think your product or your service is?
Well, it's impossible to tell. When we first launched, we were hoping for, you know, maybe 400, 500 people. Harvard didn't have a Facebook, so that's the gap that we were trying to fill. And now we're at 100,000 people, so who knows where we're going next.
Mark Zuckerberg, looking like the teenager he still is, wearing a striped preppy button-up. This might be his first ever proper interview. And he seems excited. He's on TV.
What is the Facebook exactly?
It's an online directory that connects people through universities and colleges through their social networks there. You sign on, you make a profile about yourself by answering some questions, entering some information such as your concentration or major at school.
On-screen footage displays this strange pale blue new website. It's a bit nostalgic to see it now. A series of boxes. No news feed, no algorithm yet. On this website, you can search for people you know, you can friend them, and you can look at their profiles. Thefacebook.com is a website you visit, probably from your desktop computer. Smartphones don't exist yet.
Which means the internet is still a place you could choose to visit or not. Not this force that has expanded to fill every space in society. But Mark's website is going to help change that.
We're hoping to have many more universities by fall, hopefully over 100 or 200. And from there, we're going to launch a bunch of side applications which should keep people coming back to the site and maybe could make something cool.
You were covering different people who'd started these companies. Many of them were just content to become unimaginably wealthy and not take over the internet. Did you see anything in him that seemed different from like MySpace Tom?
Absolutely. Zuckerberg has always been known to be a supremely competitive person, sort of like on the level of a Michael Jordan. You read the stories about Michael Jordan being sort of unable to avoid turning anything into a competition. And Zuckerberg is that way too. His favorite video game is Civilization and always has been.
And in his free time to this day, he plays Civilization and schemes to take over the entire world.
So wait, the way he unwinds from scheming and trying to take over the entire world is to play video game about scheming and trying to take over the entire world? That's right. It's like if we went home and played Podcast Tycoon. Literally.
Literally.
When did you start covering Mark Zuckerberg and or Facebook?
Oh, man. Too long ago, as far back as 2010, when I had graduated into the financial crisis and got a job doing tech reporting where I had no idea what I was doing.
This is Mike Isaac, now a reporter for the New York Times. These days, a veteran tech reporter. But back when he started, he found himself documenting the birth of the social media internet we live in today. He was watching the beginning of all these changes we're still trying to make sense of.
This was like a heady time in the tech industry. Now it seems like crazy long ago, but this was before Facebook went public, before Twitter went public. The questions people were asking around social media was, is this going to be another MySpace? Which now is like ridiculous in retrospect, but like it very much was this thing where people were curious if this was going to be a fad or not.
2010, though, was also the year that this would start to change. Facebook had by then moved from Cambridge to Palo Alto, and the site had kept adding new features. The news feed, the like button, it now had advertisers on the site. In 2010, it would reach 500 million users. As it grew, as it kept growing, some people started to worry.
There was a vague apprehension that social media's growing power might be a problem, even if no one could exactly predict the shape of the problem. A few years earlier, Facebook had had a big privacy scandal, where users were opted in to a program called Beacon that shared your data with advertisers and notified your friends of purchases you made. And so the concern in 2010 became privacy.
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was a strange new kind of big brother figure who might use the information we were so freely giving him against us. Journalists had questions.
And I just want to say, there's a lot of things to talk about Mark, but I think he has a lot of guts to come up here and talk about it.
I just was telling him that.
This is from a famous onstage interview from 2010, where Mark Zuckerberg agrees to sit down with journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg.
So, without further ado, Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg walks on stage wearing what was at the time his signature outfit, a zip-up hoodie. In the video, the billionaire has just turned 26.
Mark had not done a ton of these giant on-stage interview things. Like, his handlers knew that he was uncomfortable doing press, hated doing press, and tried to keep him in a contained, protective environment. But they were starting to get attacked for privacy stuff, and he had to, as CEO, defend himself in public.
Is that a wrong perception? Have you been wrongly labeled with that? Or is that something that you didn't communicate right? Or what is your feeling about that?
Sure. So... I mean, privacy is a really important issue for us and for the Internet. So we spend a lot of time thinking about these things. In terms of the settings that we have, I think that there are some misperceptions.
Zuckerberg is sitting there, and one thing he... I'm not sure if he's ever publicly addressed this, but privately, and it's been written in some books, like, he just has a sweating problem when he gets nervous. Like, he just starts... perspiring when he's all in his head, when he's got cameras all over him. I actually relate to this. I have this similar thing in person.
Like, now I just sort of say, hey, by the way, I'm going to start sweating if I get nervous, and it diffuses it. But he definitely did not have the ability to acknowledge it. He just sort of, like, goes into anxiety mode and melts down.
Do you feel like you're adequately portrayed? Because I want to wonder about the person who actually created this thing.
Yeah, I mean... They cut to a very close close-up of his face. He looks like a teenager pulled over for a DUI. You can see the beads of sweat collecting. I can't go back and change the past.
He's sweating so much, he seems so uncomfortable, that Kara Swisher does something you could read as either caring or humiliating. She makes this suggestion.
You want to take off the hoodie?
No, I never take off the hoodie.
I know you don't. There's a group of women in the audience that wish you would.
No. Girls? Whoa.
All right.
All right. That's okay. Can you explain what this instant personalization thing was that you did and why you did it and what's the value of it to your users? Maybe I should take off the hoodie.
Take off the hoodie. Go ahead. Here.
You all right? Yeah. This is a great moment in Internet history.
What?
You all right?
Um, what are we going to do with the mic?
And I think he, obviously he's like mortified. And like, it goes horribly on pretty much every level for him because of the optics.
This is kind of like a famous moment in early Zuckerberg lore. Again, Casey Newton, also remembering this sweaty moment.
He was not like a bold, defiant, confrontational persona. He was slipping in his own flop sweat. Was like kind of early Zuckerberg.
For Casey, this moment isn't just about the public humiliation of a young billionaire CEO. It's also about seeing a version of Zuckerberg who was much more open to tough conversation, who saw an upside in publicly engaging with his critics.
I think that early Zuckerberg was characterized by some amount of humility. He grew up and he surrounded himself with people who would disagree with him often and seemed to relish disagreement. Like this was not the sort of visionary who believed that only he could build the future. This was somebody who was much more collaborative and was sort of seeking other people's opinions.
And by the way, I would say that this perspective does run counter to what I think the stereotype of early Zuckerberg was, and to some extent still remains, which is a sort of bloodless lizard creature who has no empathy and does not understand normal human relationships. Yeah. I never really thought that that was true.
I think that in order to do what Zuckerberg does, you have to get deeply in touch with what people want. He just does it differently than most people.
Do you think that the lizard blood thing is basically because of that film, The Social Network? Or was it just something that people wanted to believe about a Silicon Valley person? Where do you think that came from?
Yes, I do think that the social network played a huge role in shaping not just the perception of Zuckerberg, but it shaped Zuckerberg itself. Like, it was a very formative moment for him.
When you're trying to understand Mark Zuckerberg, this movie comes up a lot. Much more than any takedown piece or criticism from the press. The Social Network, released in 2010, was a phenomenon. It won Oscars. People were trying to decide what to do with their anxiety about social media, and this movie told them a story that explained their discomfort back to them.
Relationship status. Interested in. This is what drives life in college. Are you having sex or aren't you? It's white people.
Jesse Eisenberg plays a stammering, sweaty, power-hungry Mark Zuckerberg. In this scene, he's showing the prototype of the website he's made to the co-founder, who he will later, in the movie, backstab.
You know, that's what the Facebook is going to be about. People are going to log on because after all the cake and watermelon, there's a chance they're actually going to get laid. Meet a girl. Yes. That is really good.
Hollywood's Mark Zuckerberg is a character who thinks he's smarter than really anyone, who has built a website that'll shape our very lives, but who is depicted as a person missing a core part of his humanity.
Imagine being Zuckerberg, still in your early 20s, and there's an Oscar-winning movie that is just based on a series of lies about how you started this company, right? Can you say more about that? What were the lies?
The premise of Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network is that Mark Zuckerberg was a unlucky in love loser who started Facebook because he was desperate to meet girls and would essentially stop at nothing to do that. When in reality, At Harvard, Zuckerberg was dating the woman who is now still his wife, Priscilla Chan, and that was true the entire time.
And it's just sort of left on the cutting room floor, but it actually is quite a profound deception because the entire film rests on this premise of why Facebook was started that just is not true.
Mike Isaac, the Times reporter, also agrees that the social network did a number on Mark Zuckerberg.
I think, based on people around him that I talked to, just based on my experience over the years, that really, this is a strong word, but I think it traumatized him, honestly. Like, this becomes him in the public eye, and I think that bothered him, and there's no real way to escape it.
So in a way, yet another sort of origin story of first the press comes after me, now the film industry is portraying me as this sort of conniving billionaire figure. I'm never going to get a fair shake sort of thing.
You know, it's funny. That word traumatizes. It's like there's people who... You know, it's like the word we use for an unusual kind of wound that shapes people in which they sort of, they grow around. It's a word that people often don't want to lend to people with so much power.
But if we're trying to understand people who have a huge amount of cultural power, like, I've never seen someone become famous without being wounded by it. And without feeling like then they become... a person in battle with their public image. And for you, that film is like the time where that wound settles into his ego.
I think that's right. For him, it might not be super clear cut, but it definitely evolved over time in these very public moments. And like, if the movie, it would be one thing if the movie weren't good and popular. And this is the exact worst case scenario for him because it was both of those things.
Obviously, there is some truth in the movie. The real Zuckerberg is ruthless and not known for his emotional sensitivity. Still, a different kind of rich and powerful person might have sued for libel. But Casey Newton says that this version of Zuckerberg was deeply committed to his free speech ethos, for better or worse.
Before 2016, Facebook had... pretty light moderation in a lot of ways. Their workforce of content moderators was relatively small. They would do irresponsible things like set up shop in countries in the global south where they did not have any or more than a couple employees who spoke the language. It was just sort of grow, grow, grow at all costs.
but he had this understanding of free speech, which was just frankly very similar to the set of values that were handed to me growing up in America in the 80s and 90s, where, for example, there was a lot of tolerance for Holocaust denial, not because folks agreed with it, but because we held this value of free speech so preciously in America that we thought that the way to fight back against all forms of prejudice
was to air it out rather than to chase it into the shadows. And so Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, famously for many, many years, permitted Holocaust denial on the platforms. And, you know, I think probably some degree of anti-Semitism directed his own way because he felt like this is just sort of how we do things in this country.
When Mark Zuckerberg first sat in his dorm room, listening to Daft Punk and coding thefacebook.com, he was not imagining he'd have to have a policy on whether people on his website would be allowed to persuade you that the Holocaust never happened. The Facebook was supposed to be a place for Harvard kids to make friends.
Mark Zuckerberg could not have understood that the website he was building would help change the shape of our discourse. Usher in an internet where everyone was always competing for attention, where the people who won that competition wouldn't need to tell the truth, or challenge your existing beliefs, or even be sane. That actually, those attributes would just serve to slow you down.
Sometimes I wonder if these questions we periodically ask, about whether Meta should be run to please liberals or conservatives, offer more free speech or less misinformation, if all that doesn't miss the better question. Do we actually want these social media platforms at all? But I digress. To return to our story, by 2013, the future is coming into focus.
Facebook has gone public, reached a billion users, and acquired Instagram. And Mark Zuckerberg, who remember, dropped out of college to build a website, a guy who despite all his success, spent most of his time working in an office in California, he starts to look outwards. What problems could he solve in this world with all the money and power he's earned? What does he believe in?
Here's Times reporter Mike Isaac.
There's these issues that as he grows up under the spotlight, you know, he goes from early 20s to mid 20s. Yeah. He starts figuring out things that he might start to care about. And often that's through the filter of friends and people around him.
This Mark Zuckerberg is an idealist. The words Mike uses are optimistic and naive about what it will mean to try to change the world for the better. He looks at education, disease prevention, and most notably, immigration reform. He makes friends with a man named Jose Antonio Vargas.
Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and activist, someone who had come out publicly as an unauthorized immigrant. Zuckerberg decides he wants to help people like Vargas succeed in America. Here's Zuckerberg in 2013 talking to journalist James Bennett, who seems a little incredulous that Mark Zuckerberg thinks he can troubleshoot one of the most intractable issues in American society.
You were up on the Hill today. You met with House Republicans, I think, to talk about this. I wonder what your level of optimism is about actually getting something done in the short term.
Well, you know, I'm optimistic, but I'm an entrepreneur. You don't go off and try to build something crazy if you're not optimistic fundamentally about the world.
Zuckerberg says he's already been talking to politicians about comprehensive immigration reform. He says across the aisle, people are interested in fixing the problem, finding a path to citizenship.
I mean, I've only encountered people who seem like they have good intentions and want to move this forward and care about the people in their districts. And what we're trying to do with Forward.Us is, I mean, obviously we're not writing the law, right? I mean, all these folks know way more about the sensitivities than we do.
We just want to be there to help support folks who are going to have to take challenging positions on something that's going to be controversial, but they ultimately believe is the right thing. So that's why we're here and what we're going to try to do to help out.
Mike Isaac says that this is another version of Zuckerberg he can remember once existing. A guy with a surprising amount of faith in the American political process.
From what I've heard, what people I've talked to, there was this earnest view of the world, or at least of Washington, where if I can go in and explain my views to these people in Congress, I will be able to have a sort of rigorous intellectual debate. And like, maybe we disagree on things, but we can sort of have that discourse.
There are obviously he has enough paid Washington folks around him who find that idea absurd, but they're not going to tell the boss you are wildly naive and you have not come to the level of cynicism that you need to engage in Washington. But I think that that probably explains the early years of some of these initiatives.
After the break, the cruel world conspires to break the heart of an idealistic billionaire, and the path to Trump begins. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Lumen. Are you ready to jumpstart your health in 2025? Lumen can help. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath.
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New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. December 1st, 2015, Mark Zuckerberg's first daughter is born. To mark the day, he posts on Facebook a letter he and his wife have written to her. It's a glimpse of how Mark Zuckerberg, in that moment, sees things.
He says that the world is getting better, even if the news focuses on what's wrong, but he lists some of the problems that still need solving.
Quote, if you fear you'll go to prison rather than college because of the color of your skin, or that your family will be deported because of your legal status, or that you may be a victim of violence because of your religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity, then it's difficult to reach your full potential. And in the same post, Mark Zuckerberg makes a startling announcement.
He promises most of his wealth at the time, about $45 billion, to a new organization he's starting with his wife, dedicated to making the world a better place. His wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is a pretty extraordinary character in her own right.
A first-generation American, the daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, first in her immediate family to go to college, Harvard, where she volunteered at housing projects five days a week while studying to become a pediatrician. Chan and her story seem obviously to have influenced her husband.
Their new organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, its priorities will include immigration reform and education. The view here seems to be Obama-era liberal, that life is fundamentally unfair, and that those who have succeeded have a responsibility to try to iron out that unfairness for everybody else. Again, this is 2015.
Ten years from now, Mark Zuckerberg will be hosting the inauguration party for a president whose political priorities include mass deportations and tax cuts for billionaires. But that's now. This was then. Mike Isaac, the New York Times reporter, has spent a lot of time reporting on the factors behind Zuckerberg's shift,
We're going to walk you through them, starting with factor number one, 2016, Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton and the country's reaction to that victory.
Democracy itself and the most powerful nation on earth may have been undermined by fake news.
Elect of the United States of America, Donald Trump.
Immediately, there's this slew of articles basically pointing at Facebook, saying this has to be the reason that Donald Trump was elected.
During the election season, Facebook was paid at least $100,000 by Russian troll farms for advertising.
You know, it's funny now because like this is still seen as like an aberration in democracy. Right. There's no way that the American people could have elected Donald Trump. This had to be manipulation from foreign governments. This had to be the spread of disinformation across Facebook. And like, look, those things did happen, do happen. Right.
But that was like the only way people could accept that this happened in their minds.
Facebook has come under fire recently for its role in last year's election. Reports have surfaced showing the social networking site was a breeding ground for misinformation.
All the guns turn on Zuckerberg and Facebook on both sides of the aisle. The Republicans were already going after him, but the Democrats are now looking at him. So he has no friends.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
2018, Zuckerberg has to go to Washington, to both the Senate and the House, to answer for both the election and his latest privacy scandal.
Zuckerberg will try to explain how a data mining company got a hold of information from 87 million Facebook users. Congress will also press for details on how Russians used fake accounts.
Chairman Grassley, Chairman Thune, Ranking Member Feinstein and Ranking Member Nelson and members of the committee.
Mark Zuckerberg in a navy blue suit, light blue tie, ancient Roman hairstyle. The hoodie's gone. He's 33, looks the part of a young CEO. His eyes are wide open and fixed, like the big blink you take after putting in a contact lens.
We face a number of important issues around privacy, safety, and democracy. And you will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer.
This was, I would say, the period where they were trying to fix it, and I think in an earnest attempt. Now, there's limits to that later on, but I think this was like the, okay, we messed up, how do we fix it sort of period.
But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry.
I think he saw it as a kind of penance that he had to do and say, like, look, I'm going to come, I'm going to explain myself in good faith again because that's what we're doing, and I can point to the literal billions of dollars and many thousands of people we've hired to fix this problem, and then you will all understand, of course. And what happens instead? They do not understand.
Or look, they may understand and they don't give a shit anyway. You know, like it's the level of cynicism of Washington. Like, look, I'm not saying Zuckerberg is right. I'm not saying he came to the Hill with the correct point of view. But I think to the degree that I'm aware of his mentality, he thought that going and explaining what they were doing would solve some of these problems.
And it didn't. Mr. Zuckerberg, I remember well your first visit to Capitol Hill back in 2010.
This is an exchange that would become somewhat legendary. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, 84 at the time, meaning that the cutting-edge technology of his college years would have been the color television.
You spoke to the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force, which I chair. You said back then that Facebook would always be free. Is that still your objective?
Senator, yes, there will always be a version of Facebook that is free. It is our mission to try to help connect everyone around the world and to bring the world closer together. In order to do that, we believe that we need to offer a service that everyone can afford, and we're committed to doing that.
Well, if so, how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?
Senator, we run ads. I see.
Zuckerberg's like sort of pithy response. That becomes a meme in Silicon Valley or at Menlo Park where his headquarters is. They make little stickers that say, Senator, we sell ads. Making fun of Congress and that senator in particular placed them all over their laptops and stuff. It's like this moment of kind of almost contempt because...
You're supposed to be having this, you know, high-minded, elevated discussion. And instead, these people he doesn't even want to talk to show up completely unprepared in his eyes to give this level of questioning.
These hearings, not all the questioning is unreasonable. Some of it's sharp. But there is a lot that runs from confused grandparent not understanding internet to confused, somewhat angry grandparent also not understanding internet.
Here's what everybody's been trying to tell you today, and I say this gently. Your user agreement sucks.
Republican John Mealy Kennedy of Louisiana, choosing to use his time on the floor as he sees fit.
I'm going to suggest to you that you go back home and rewrite it. And tell your $1,200 an hour lawyers, no disrespect, they're good. But tell them you want it written in English and non-Swahili.
There's so much political theater going on in any congressional hearing. And a lot of it is, if you watch any one of these, one senator or one congressperson will get a couple of minutes to yell at a CEO on their pet issue and carve that up into...
30-second soundbites than they can then distribute to their constituents on social media to prove that their congressperson is worth being in Congress, right? So the goal of a hearing a lot of the times is not to get anywhere substantive. It's just to flog someone in public.
There's, of course, an irony here. Mark Zuckerberg showing up again and again to Capitol Hill, imagining he's going to have substantive conversations with these politicians, who instead are just trying to make short, good clips for the gram. Meaning, he was a victim here of dynamics amplified by his own social media platforms. Dynamics his businesses in some ways relied on.
Mike says for years, somehow, it was like Mark Zuckerberg was unable to grasp the underlying reality. He thought these politicians wanted conversation, that the right set of words in the right order might allow him to be understood.
But Mike says by 2020, even Mark Zuckerberg had become disabused of the naivete that permitted him to believe that American politicians wanted to understand or work with him. And if Zuckerberg's faith in the system was reaching a bottom then, something else was about to happen to help him find newer depths. The next factor in Zuckerberg's path towards Trump? The pandemic.
So COVID hits in 2020. Everyone goes through crisis mode. Obviously, the tech industry has to reconfigure how it works. People are being forced indoors and flocking online to these different websites like his and record numbers.
I had this one phone call with him on the record where he's like, yeah, we're just fighting to keep the lights on over here because people are on Facebook and Instagram and all this shit like in record numbers, like their servers are on fire.
Oh, so they just had like the engineering problem of like Taylor Swift ticket day, but for Facebook, all of a sudden, a website that's existed at this point for 16 years.
All day, every day. Yes. This is also the days where either we don't know a lot about COVID and how the spread of it works or what the virus does or what the vaccine does or what the cure is or whatever, right? And like Zuckerberg says later that he starts getting really hammered by the Biden administration.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
What Mike's referring to there is some recent interviews Zuckerberg has given. For instance, last week's with Joe Rogan, where he talks quite candidly about how frustrating it was to run a social media company during the COVID era. In his Rogan appearance, it's clearly the new Zuckerberg, the same one who took to Instagram Reels to change his moderation policies.
But listening to the conversation's three-hour sprawl, I got a clearer sense of the guy. And it helped me begin to answer a question I and a lot of people have been having lately. How are these tech CEOs finding a new home in Magaland, in the Big Ten anti-wokeism that Joe Rogan represents?
I've listened to a lot of Zuckerberg interviews, and with Rogan, there's a quality I've never before detected. He sounds comfortable. They talk like two newish friends, each with some small influence on the other. Zuck gets compliments about his Brazilian jiu-jitsu training.
I walked in here today, you look thicker. You look like a different guy. You do. You look like a jiu-jitsu guy now. It's funny. I saw your neck. I'm like, his neck's bigger. Your neck is bigger. Good.
Joe learns about a zombie hunting VR game he might like. My zombie game is Arizona Sunshine.
Oh, what's that one?
Oh, it's, you just like, it can be multiplayer and there's horde mode where you just get in there and...
It's a Rogan interview, so you get, honestly, everything. Sports injuries, peptides, AI safety, a late interview pee break. For our purposes today, though, what sticks out is how fired up this new Mark Zuckerberg sounds when he talks about what it was like running Facebook during COVID.
How at first he didn't mind censoring what he considered obviously dangerous information, but how that began to change.
I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of COVID. It seemed like, okay, you have this virus. It seems like it's killing a lot of people. I don't know. We didn't know at the time how dangerous it was going to be. So at the beginning, it kind of seemed like, okay, we should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this.
But when it went from, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve to, you know, and like in the beginning it was like, okay, there aren't enough masks, masks aren't that important, to then it's like, oh, no, you have to wear a mask. And, you know, like everything was shifting around. It just became very difficult to kind of follow. And this really hit the most extreme, I'd say, during...
It was during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. And I'm generally like pretty pro rolling out vaccines. I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative. I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it.
And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true, right? I mean, they basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down. And I was just like, well, we're not going to do that. Like, we're clearly not going to do that. I mean, that is kind of inarguably true.
Who is they? Who's telling you to take down things that talk about vaccine side effects?
It was people in the Biden administration. I think it was...
Zuckerberg's story is that COVID is what ultimately changed him. That he couldn't believe that he, a tech CEO, had had to explain the First Amendment to the U.S. government. It's right there in the country's terms of service. That's the story he tells Rogan.
It might be entirely true.
It could be partly strategic. Where I'm sure I believe him is when he expresses how little faith he has left in our traditional institutions. The government, the media. He talks a lot about how legacy media will be gone soon. Replaced, he hopes, by independent creators like Rogan. It's clear he cannot wait.
And since then, I think generally trust in media has fallen off a cliff, right? So I don't think I'm alone in that journey. I think that's basically the experience that a lot of people have had is, okay, the stuff that's being written about is not kind of all accurate. And even if the facts are right, it's kind of written from a slant a lot of the time. Of course. And then...
And then there was the government version of it, which is during COVID, which is okay. It's like our government is telling us that we need to censor true things. It's like, this is a disaster.
So that's factor two, COVID. And there's another factor that emerged around the same time. Factor three, the circular firing squad. There's this political science term for Americans who basically identify as liberals, but who find other liberals deeply annoying.
They're called liberals, meaning life anywhere left of center in this country means often being annoyed or even enraged by the people you theoretically have the most in common with. But some of those annoyed people stay in the coalition and others defect. And the old Mark Zuckerberg had seemed able to tolerate progressive allies who often viewed him with extreme suspicion.
Take his philanthropic initiative, the one that he and his wife had set up to spend tens of billions of their own dollars to try to solve the world's most intractable problems. Even back when he denounced it, some critics had accused him of doing the whole thing as some kind of elaborate tax dodge.
I mean, on a really base level for him and for Priscilla, I think there's part of it where they're like, we are billionaires trying to give away all of our money to you and you're still giving me the middle finger. What is that about, right?
Like there's a lot of how are you being this ungrateful or spiteful or like me clearly trying to do what I think is the right thing and still not, like I can't win sort of thing. I try to be a correctly behaving selfless billionaire and you say that instead it's all me being manipulative or trying to make this work to my ends. So why even try in some of these regards?
All this Facebook money was being viewed suspiciously in progressive circles. Noses were turned up. And at other times, being aligned with more polarizing causes would get meta in trouble. For instance, all the work they'd done on immigration reform did not make them a lot of friends in Trump's first administration.
So Mark Zuckerberg evolved, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative went from a place trying to solve some of the world's thorniest problems to a place that chose causes not connected to any of our country's eight or nine ongoing culture wars.
As CZI, their philanthropic arm, sort of grows in Dobbs came and struck down Roe v. Wade, there were folks inside who wanted to make a strong stand against that and focus on giving money to abortion aid across different states in the country. And there was a moment where Priscilla internally sent a memo saying, our mission is not to focus on this. We need to focus on other things.
Like, basically any... Throw a dart at the dartboard of contentious social issues of our time. And they were like, we do not want to touch that shit anymore. Let's focus on... STEM and science and cancer research and eliminating all disease is the thing he likes to say, right?
And that, I think, is the thing they shifted more toward as they had to worry about, you know, does this put a political target on our back?
The same hot cultural winds causing Zuckerberg to think about his philanthropy more carefully were making life more complicated inside Meta. Meta employees had started to have their own fights about free speech within the company. What people should say, what they shouldn't, what they had to.
There'd been this incident years earlier in 2016, where Mark Zuckerberg had reprimanded an anonymous employee who'd crossed out the words Black Lives Matter on a chalkboard at Facebook and written over them, All Lives Matter. Zuckerberg reprimanding the employee was unusual for him, since it amounted, in a sense, to real-life speech moderation.
And it set an expectation for his employees about his values that actually made it trickier to navigate what would happen just a few years later in 2020, the era of the George Floyd protests.
when internally people were speaking out about it obviously but like what would happen would be some employees would go after other employees for saying you're not speaking out in the way i would like you to right or you're not being vocal enough you're not tweeting about it you're not posting about it or whatever and i think any reasonable person could have a discussion whether you think that's okay or not right like i think that's fine to argue
But it ended up in this really contentious point inside of Facebook where, you know, the company endorsed it at one point, but what are the limits of that? Where should they intervene and say, you're not allowed to say this anymore?
And Zuckerberg in particular, I think, it bothers him to be like, okay, well, do, and I'm putting words in his mouth, but do the wokest sort of have the right to tell me what I should or shouldn't be saying publicly? I...
And this is the thing that sort of bothers me now about the way he's talking about coming clean or going back to their roots on speech and stuff like that, is it almost feels like he's casting himself as a passive participant in his company and the way it's run, right?
I think it bothers me because it just feels conveniently passive in retrospect, especially for his posturing now, if that makes sense.
I think it does. I mean, I think what I hear you saying is, like, there's another way he could tell this story where he could say, like, look, in 2020, like, a lot of people thought that the most salient issues in American life were things that progressives cared about, like racial inequity and racial discrimination. And I thought corporations should help solve those problems. And...
I still think those problems are important. There's other problems I want to solve. I'm not sure corporations should be on the front lines of solving those problems. In fact, the reason everyone got mad at the corporations was because all they were ever going to do was pay lip service because those aren't problems a software company is going to solve. And I just feel differently.
Yeah.
You are the Wizard of Oz, man. Like, come on. Like, yes, the way you put it feels 100% more honest to me, or at least something that I would accept as an answer, whether you agree with it or not. I think that's reasonable. And I think he's probably not alone in that point of view, right? I think there's probably a lot of people who... may feel differently than they did three or four years ago.
But I also think that is where we meet the other reason he's doing this positioning now, which is the rise of Trump.
The final factor, what Joe Rogan might call the fear factor. This is the factor that hangs over and confounds everything. Mark Zuckerberg has a lot to gain if he can get on Trump's good side. If Trump even just lets the TikTok ban go through, that alone would be a bonanza for Instagram. And Trump's bad side is a dangerous place for a social media executive to be.
Last August, before he won the election, Trump was already threatening Zuckerberg. He wrote, quote, Trump's referring, it seems, to Zuckerberg's moderation policies in 2020, as well as some donations that his initiative made to polling station safety during the pandemic, which Trump did not like.
Just last week, when Zuckerberg announced that he'd be changing Meta's moderation policies, firing the fact-checkers, a reporter at a Trump press conference asked the incoming president what he thought of these changes.
Meta said today it would stop putting fact-checks on its website and just allow community... Well, I watched their news conference, and I thought it was a very good news conference.
I think they've, honestly, I think they've come a long way, Meta. Facebook. I think they've come a long way. I watched it. The man was very impressive. I watched it. Actually, I watched it on Fox. I'm not allowed to say that.
Say it. Do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past? Probably.
If you missed that, Trump said, probably. Yeah, probably. Meaning, he thinks Zuckerberg got the message. So these are the factors. The winds all blowing Mark Zuckerberg rightward.
Frustration with a left that distrusts tech billionaires, frustration with progressive culture post-2020 in general, a lost trust in the government during COVID, and an understanding that Trump is just a better friend than he is an enemy. That's the Mark Zuckerberg we have for now.
Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
Which brings us back to the Instagram reel, where Zuckerberg told us about his new vision for Meta.
But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.
We're going to take a short break and then we will close our show by returning to Casey Newton, who's going to explain how this new version of Mark Zuckerberg's new version of his platforms is going to actually work in practice. What we should expect online as we walk into the first days of the second Trump presidency.
I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there and more to come soon.
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Go to viore.com slash pjsearch and discover the versatility of Viore clothing. Welcome back to the show. We started today talking to Casey Newton of Platformer about these changes Mark Zuckerberg had announced at Meta. And while Zuckerberg had laid out a big picture vision for his sites in his Instagram Reel, over the week, many more details emerged.
Some of them because Casey actually got his hands on sensitive internal documents meant only for Meta's moderators. So I wanted to end this week with Casey. His views on some of the stranger, unintended consequences of these new rules and where Mark Zuckerberg might be heading, I found myself pretty surprised. Here's our conversation. Okay, so...
First of all, just like in general, these announcements, like how big a deal are these changes in your world?
These are the most important changes that Meta has made to content moderation and just basically what it feels like to use Facebook or Instagram since the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election.
And would you say that the changes are as big as that, bigger? I know these are like hard things to quantify.
It is going to take us some time to understand not just what the new policies are, although we do know a lot about that now, but also how they are enforced. One of the major changes is that instead of proactively scanning every post to see what policies it might violate, Meta is now going to rely on users to report things that potentially have violated those guidelines.
It is going to take us some time to understand what the effect of that is. Does bad stuff on these platforms continue to get reported and removed if it needs to be? Or with more conversations taking place in private groups and private chats where maybe bad stuff is less likely to be reported, maybe a lot of it just kind of skates underneath the radar.
Or maybe stuff gets reported but doesn't get taken down. So there are still many, many swirling questions. But when I've talked to executives at the company about what they think this means, they've said the overall effect is you should expect us to take a lot less action on posts on Facebook and Instagram in general.
Okay, so there are some people who look at these changes and they think the same way that X's policies when it was Twitter were more designed to make progressives and journalists happy, now it's shifted so they're trying to welcome the right crypto people and pornographers. This is just like Facebook making its version of its shift.
It wants to be more friendly to libertarians and the center-right. Do you see this as that sort of adjustment, or do you see it as something bigger?
I do see it as that sort of adjustment, and I would offer a reason that Meta is doing this that is perhaps a bit less discussed. which is that for many years now, when Meta would pull users about their criticisms of the company, what they didn't like about using Facebook or Instagram, the number one thing that they would get back is that
Meta had taken action against their post, that they had published something that they thought was benign and found that had been removed, that they had been put in what is sometimes called Facebook jail and weren't allowed to post for some time. This drives people insane. And that is a real thing. You know, I've had, you know, an Instagram story, you know, got a strike on it.
I posted a tweet that like made some sort of joke about Al-Qaeda and I got some sort of, you know, notification accusing me of offering material support to terrorism. That is an annoying thing. Well, I don't want to get into it on the advice of my lawyer, PJ. But that is an annoying thing. And of course, it is exasperating to be falsely accused of something that you didn't do, right?
And Meta was effectively doing this millions of times a day to people, and it was truly infuriating people.
And if you think about the composition of Meta's user base, particularly on Facebook in the United States, which is what they pay the most attention to, that is a user base that is getting older, that leans much more to the right than maybe the median journalist or the critics of the company.
And we've also seen through empirical studies that people on the right are more likely to share misinformation and they're more likely as a result to have their content taken action on.
I see.
So what that means is that over time, this truly was becoming a worse and worse problem for Meta with Facebook in particular because their policies were disproportionately affecting some of their best customers. I see.
But you think, generally speaking, this will apply to people who are more to the right, but also it'll apply... One of the emails I get kind of a lot, actually, is tattoo artists are often running into Instagram moderation problems. Even groups like that are just less likely to run into a robot telling them they've broken a rule.
Yes, and this touches on left and liberal politics as well. There's been good empirical reporting that Meta disproportionately removed content expressing support for Palestine. This gets a bit wonky as well. Hamas is designated by the United States as a terrorist group, and Meta will downrank content that is linked to designated terrorist groups. Wow.
And so people on the left who've been trying to express their support for Palestine have seen their posts removed. Another long-running complaint on the left is that sex workers constantly have their posts removed from Facebook and Instagram, even if the posts themselves are relatively benign. And so there may be a world in which... We see more left and liberal speech on these properties.
And, you know, again, we're just going to have to sort of wait and see. But at least as written, there are elements of these changes that would seem to benefit the left more. and right.
Now, I would also say they specifically carved out exceptions to their hate speech policy, seemingly specifically to appease Republicans when it comes to LGBT people and immigrants, but that is a different thread in the story. So tell me, what are these carve outs? So Meta communicates its policies in two ways. One, there is a public set of guidelines, which tend to be fairly high level.
And then there is a second secret set of guidelines that are distributed to the Meta employees and contractors who actually have to enforce those guidelines when they're looking at posts.
So it's like the high level guidelines we all get to see are like, thou shalt not kill. But then like actually what that means, like how to actually follow these rules that goes to the teams. Yeah.
That's right. And last week, a great publication called Platformer published some of these guidelines, PJ. I happened to get ahold of some of them. And I was really struck by these guidelines that were given to moderators on the question, do insults about mental illness and abnormality violate when targeting people on the basis of gender or sexual orientation? So in the past,
you could not say, for example, gay people are insane. PJ, today you can say that gay people are insane, which is something that typically I only approve of when gay people are saying to each other at brunch. But now it's anything goes.
Wait, and let me ask, why... The justification? Yeah, why make a rule saying you can say gay people are insane?
The justification is that this is now just part of what Meta calls the mainstream discourse, which is essentially whether you view these... statements as harmful or not, and I view them as harmful, Mehta would say, well, it's being debated on the floor of Congress, and there should not be anything that can be debated on the floor of Congress that could not be debated on our properties as well.
That sounds like a really savvy point, but then you realize that there is actually a law in Congress that enables members of Congress to say literally anything with no legal consequence. The floor of Congress is the single most protected speech zone in the entire United States. Wait, really? What does that mean? I have to look that up, too. Mike Masnick wrote a great post about it at TechDirt.
But for example, the big one is like you can slander your political rivals. So you could say, you know, pick your congressman. You know, you could accuse them of like a heinous crime and you could not be held liable for that. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah.
So anyway, my point is just Congress, maybe not the best example of where we want to set our speech rules because truly anything goes there. But, you know, the truly most alarming part of these new guidelines to me was in these new guidelines, Metta says you are allowed to say a trans woman isn't a woman, it's a pathetic, confused man, or a trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it.
Again, I regard that language as very harmful. It is dehumanizing, like truly just actually denying the humanity of another person. And now you have people at Meta who are just writing these statements and giving users carte blanche to say them and also to say, this will not be removed.
So life on Facebook, on threads, on Instagram, the discourse you can expect to see there, It's about to change. I had one final question for Casey about the man behind all this, Mark Zuckerberg. So I spend a week just trying to do something that I don't do every week, which is just understand Mark Zuckerberg as a person as much as I can. I feel like the portrait I get of him is somebody who...
I feel like at some point he at least made choices and expressed values that seemed more like center-left. And he's become somebody who believes that being an ally of the left is just not strategic for him. Like, he seems annoyed by the left. He seems like he just doesn't think it helps his business. But what I wonder about a little bit is the long-term play here, because Donald Trump...
does not actually like free speech. Like, he likes when people say nice things about him. But he has a very long track record of using the government to interfere with private businesses, which Mark Zuckerberg clearly hates, and of punishing people who say things that Donald Trump doesn't like.
So, like, I understand that on the left, there's right now fear and anger about Mark Zuckerberg sort of turning all the dials rightward. But I guess what I wonder is, like, how long do you think Mark Zuckerberg can stay on Donald Trump's good side? And how long do you think Donald Trump would stay on his? Yeah.
I mean, that is basically asking me to predict the position of an atom in two years. Like, good luck to any of us who would hazard a guess. The range of possibilities for that question is basically infinite. But maybe I could sort of sketch out two scenarios. Yeah.
One scenario I've been thinking about is this question of, will the social networks that we once had, which were very large and monolithic, splinter into more partisan versions of themselves? And so eventually you have like the Fox News version of Facebook. And this actually did start to come to pass. You see the rise of a platform like a Truth Social or a Parler, right?
One scenario that I've been thinking about over the past couple of days is like, maybe Facebook becomes the Fox News version of Facebook, right? Maybe there is just this kind of right word lurch in social networking in general, because when Meta runs the numbers and they're obsessive about numbers, they just find this is better for our business.
And if there is some tiny remnant of screeching liberals, they can go elsewhere and Meta will be fine. So like that is a possibility. The other scenario, though, is that this is just Mark Zuckerberg making another 20-year mistake in the opposite direction. And in the same way that he gave the left so much of what they asked for after 2016 and found that he got nothing for it,
he will now give the right everything that they asked for for so many years, and we'll find that he gets almost nothing for it, right? It's the kind of, if you give a mouse a cookie problem, right? Okay, you have now sold out all trans people to the Republican Party. Did you think they were going to stop there? No, there's going to be another ask, right?
So how do you actually get the result that you want that way? The other reason that I'm Likelier, I think, to believe in this scenario is you look at the problems that Facebook is having right now in the majority of state legislatures around the country.
So many states are trying to prevent or dramatically limit the amount of time that teenagers can spend on social media, in some cases trying to block them from using social media altogether because of these child safety issues on the platform.
And so this moment when Facebook is under so much scrutiny for all of the harms that befall children on their platforms, for them to say, well, this is the moment that we're kind of just going to stop analyzing any posts to see if they're bad until a user reports them, that could be a world where a lot more kids get hurt and that puts even more pressure on Facebook and it makes even more people mad at them.
So that is truly one of the big question marks for me in all of this is how does a company wind up reconciling that? So anyway, those are two visions that I see.
They seem honestly kind of compatible. I mean, first of all, I tend to, to the degree that like, I mean, God, there's nothing dumber than making a prediction about the future and recording it and broadcasting it. But it seems like Facebook could both become the Fox News version of itself.
And Mark Zuckerberg could eventually realize that there were downsides to this and that what he seems to want more than anything, which is autonomy from government interference, is not something that the right is likely to provide him.
No, it really is not going to.
Yeah. It's also funny watching, I was looking at his, like, the comments on his appearance on Broken. It's just like, these people are not your friends, man.
They're really not. They're really not. Disdain for Mark Zuckerberg is a truly bipartisan phenomenon. The other thing, just wrapping up here is, you know, I was reflecting at the end of our conversation the other day, you made some remark to the effect of like, well, gosh, Casey, like you seem, you know, depressed.
And what I wish I had said at the time was, has it ever even occurred to you to ask me a fun question, PJ? You know, I listen to your other episodes and the guests get to be like, hey, why don't you walk me through the history of balloon animals? Like, I would do that too. But no, it's like, oh, hey, Casey, another piece of the internet is falling into the ocean.
Do you want to come gawk at the wreckage with me? So that's on you, PJ.
Casey, I'm so sorry, but I would not want to watch the end of the world with anyone less delightful.
Well, likewise, likewise.
Casey Newton. Again, his wonderful newsletter is called Platformer. And he has a great podcast called Hard Fork. And as for Mike Isaac, you can find him at the New York Times. And he's working on a book about Mark Zuckerberg. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.
It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Claire Hyman and Holly Patton. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarrian. Additional production support from Sean Merchant. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis.
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